After the install of headers on my car it was inevitable I would need a tune. The car has only thrown a code for the rear O2′s one time since I installed the headers but that apparently is hit & miss with the LG headers because of their long primaries and I didn’t want to take the chance on getting tripped up come inspection time. Since my inspection is due in March I wanted to get it done before the car is put away for its long winter’s nap. The question was of course who to have do it.
I knew of East Coast Supercharging from the Corvette Forum but it’s always hard to commit your precious toy to somebody without having at least a personal reference. Fortunately my buddy Mike took his ’08 to them after we had installed a Callaway Honker cold air intake. He had them install AR headers and tune the car and they did an amazing job. I’d driven Mike’s car stock and the post-headers & tune difference was amazing. As hard as that car pulled stock the power after ECS had their hands on it was incredible. The power came in earlier and the delivery was smooth all the way up through the RPM band. So I exchanged a few e-mails with Chris from ECS and setup an appointment.
Friday 10/24/08 was my turn to see the boys at ECS. Since I already had headers on my car I was having the ECS boys do the “Stage I” package, which is a Vararam cold air intake, a 160F thermostat and a dyno tune. I never got one of those round tuits to install my intended Honker CAI so I figured I’d let the pros take care of it. Mike did the install on the CAI and t-stat and it’s just amazing how easy things are when you know what you’re doing. Didn’t take him much more than an hour to do both.
Once Mike finished it was Doug’s turn with the car. He took it out on the street for nearly 1.5 hours with a pair of laptops and an O2 sensor hanging off the back adjusting the air/fuel mixture and timing. Those who aren’t inflicted with the same mental illness as some of my friends and I are now wondering “why the HELL do you need to do that??” Well here’s the deal… engines are all managed by computers these days and the programs that run them are designed very conservatively. Engineers can’t count on the fact that you’ll always use the right octane fuel, that you won’t fire the motor and start driving the car before a drop of oil can move up out of the pan and into the drivetrain, etc so they makes tons of compromises for reliability. This means there is tons of room in the programming to improve performance. So this is what Doug was doing out there with my car, and then he came back to finish it off on the dyno.
ECS uses a Dynapack 4000 chassis dynamometer. There are non-stop arguments about the validity of dyno numbers, the variance from brand-to-brand, the proper corrections. I was told that Dynapack produces generally lower numbers than Mustang dynos that a lot of folks use, but while the number is certainly interesting (and Tim Taylor-like grunt producing) what really matters is how the car performs so I won’t engage in a debate about the numbers. Doug let me watch the last couple of pulls and I took some video with Joe’s camcorder (still waiting for Joe to pull the vids off for me so I can post!). It’s a pretty cool process. With the Dynapack they lift the car and attach the dyno directly to the hubs so it’s inherently safer than running on a cylinder with the car strapped down. But what you really want to hear about are the results, right?
Click here to read about the results!
